Some business owners really love SEO as a marketing strategy because they have found success using it. But there are others who stay away from it because they have some misconceptions about SEO, that are just not true.
In this article, we addressed some of these SEO myths to clear these misconceptions.
01. SEO Is Dead
“Is SEO Dead?”
It’s the one question that every SEO expert gets asked the most.
After every major change in the SEO industry, everybody loves to talk about how SEO is dead and why it’s not a viable marketing strategy.
The most recent event was when ChatGPT was introduced and became the most hyped thing on the internet.
But guess what? SEO is still not dead and even getting more relevant.
However, SEO is a marketing strategy that evolves the most. SEO as you know it, wasn’t like this 5 years ago and it will completely change in the next 5 years.
As long as people will keep looking for information on the internet SEO will be there. That’s because, when you are doing SEO, you are optimizing content for search engines. Unless search engines go extinct, SEO is not going anywhere.
So, do you see Google being extinct in the next 10 years?
02. SEO Is Easy Enough to Do It Yourself
It doesn’t make sense how SEO costs so much when it’s just basic stuff. Think about it.
To start with SEO, you have to:
- Conduct a thorough industry and competitor analysis to learn about industry trends and your competitors’ strategies.
- Then comes keyword research, which includes finding out all the keywords that you need to rank for. Also, you will have to create a topical map for topical authority.
- After that, you need to create different forms of content for different platforms using the keywords you have researched.
- When you are done creating your content, you will need to promote it organically to your audience for backlinks.
- Also, you have to make sure that your website is technically sound meaning it’s loading fast, optimized for mobile devices, etc.
And, you’re done! Pretty simple to do it all by yourself while keeping up with a timeframe, isn’t it?
Well, no. As you can see from the procedure we just mentioned, SEO is not easy enough to do yourself. Even SEO experts can’t do it all by themselves; they have to delegate these tasks to relevant people.
That’s why SEO experts hire content creators and link-builders while they focus on research and strategy.
So, if you decide to use SEO as a marketing strategy, you will either need to work with an agency or hire in-house experts.
03. SEO Takes 3 Months to Learn
Another misconception about SEO is that it doesn’t take much time to learn.
We will admit that this is partially true. However, SEO is a field where you have to keep learning continuously.
Suppose you put your heart and soul into learning SEO and learned everything about it in a month. Then, you land a client and get him the result that he wants.
Soon after, a Google Core Algorithm update comes.
This update overshadows everything you have learned, and as it continues to roll out, your client’s website gets erased from Google SERPs.
So, what do you do next? You start studying the Google update to reshape your strategy.
This is literally the average life of an SEO expert. The learning never stops.
SEO is so unpredictable and volatile that it can turn upside down overnight. While experienced SEOs can predict this beforehand to some extent, novice SEOs must keep their eyes open for new information.
04. SEO Is a One-time Thing
Some clients who switch from another digital marketing strategy to SEO believe that it is a one-and-done deal.
Like in paid ads, when you want a boost in your sales, you start an ad campaign. When there’s enough increase in traffic and sales, you stop the ad campaign. You don’t need to worry about the campaign at all during the time it’s not running.
However, when the same business owner implements SEO, they believe the work is done after researching, optimizing, and publishing content.
Well, obviously, they’re wrong.
As we have said before, there’s a thing called Google’s core algorithm update that can change everything you know about SEO in a day.
Apart from this, setting up an SEO campaign takes a long time. You have to publish a lot of content to build your topical authority, promote your content to build a natural backlink profile, etc.
Now, to maintain this topical authority and backlink profile you have to constantly monitor and update it, which is a continuous process.
In addition, you must monitor and analyze the results of your SEO efforts. Based on this, you must make little tweaks to further improve them.
So, the summary is that SEO is a continuous process that shouldn’t be stopped even after you achieve the desired outcome.
05. You Can’t Beat Your Competitors Without Spending More
When it comes to ads, you only get results as long as you pay. So, to stay in the competition, you must have a competitive ad budget.
But in the case of SEO, it’s not mandatory that you spend more than your competitors to outperform them. Sure, having a big bank helps, but in SEO, strategy and quality matter the most.
Suppose your industry competitors’ are established brands with hundreds of employees and a huge marketing budget. Can you outrank them in search engines with a low budget?
Yes, you can! Google or other search engines don’t care how much you spend on your marketing. They only care about if you are creating quality content and providing value to their users.
If you research and strategize well, create top-notch content, and build quality and relevant backlinks, you can definitely outperform your competitors.
Now, does doing all these cost a lot of money?
That totally depends on the agency you choose. There are some SEO agencies that may break your bank. But VizibleSEO makes sure you get the best possible service with budget-friendly pricing plans.
06. Content Is Everything
Content is king. Yes, that’s true and something that we agree with.
After Google’s helpful content update and the surge of AI content creation tools, high-quality and original content has become more valuable than ever.
But can you climb the top of the Google SERP only with quality content?
In a perfect world, this would’ve been the case. But in reality, this is not true.
The first reason is that Google has a different view of quality content. To Google, being informative doesn’t directly translate to quality; it uses more metrics to judge content.
One of the metrics is user experience. Google has different metrics to measure how a user interacts with your content and place it on the SERP based on this.
Relevance is also important because the first reader of your content is actually the Googlebot. Your content may be useful to the reader, but you also have to use certain keywords and phrases so that the crawl bot understands what the content is about.
There are other metrics that measure the trustworthiness and the authoritativeness of your content, (such as backlinks).
So, when ranking is in question, to get the best result you need to work on all these ranking signals and quality content is one of these many ranking factors.
07. Placing More Keywords Means Higher Rank
We just now mentioned that content isn’t everything. There are other ranking signals to fulfill, one of which is placing keywords.
Now, there are some SEOs who take this too seriously and place keywords in every sentence of the content, believing that it will improve their ranking.
But, did it improve their ranking?
No, it did not. Instead, those pages either got de-indexed or fell so hard in rankings that they didn’t get any traffic at all.
If you remember correctly, we also mentioned user experience as a key ranking factor. When there are many keywords instead of relevant content, the user gets frustrated with your content and leaves your site.
Because of this, your site’s bounce rate goes up and Google doesn’t take it very well. As a result, you lose your ranking.
This method is called keyword stuffing, which is a bad SEO practice.
While placing keywords is important, you shouldn’t do it at the expense of content readability. Find a balance between pushing keywords while providing value to your user.
08. More Content = Better SEO
SEO means search engine optimization where we optimize for search engines. But what do we optimize? We optimize content.
Without content, there is nothing to optimize, and there is no SEO. So, content is the base requirement for search engine optimization.
However, because of this, SEOs and business owners both have a common misunderstanding that the more content you publish the better your search rankings will be.
It’s true that we have to publish a lot of content to build topical authority. But in SEO, the quality of the content brings way more value than the quantity.
Imagine, you publish 25 high-quality content on a topic, whereas your competitor published 100 thin content on that same topic. In this case, you will get better results than your competitor.
Also, because of publishing that much low-value content, your competitor’s site may get penalized.
The quality over quantity approach is for more than just content, however. It can be applied to any other aspect of SEO, such as links.
Rather than focusing on the number of backlinks, you should focus on getting backlinks that are from authority websites and are relevant to your niche.
09. Backlinks Are Not As Useful as It Was Before
Backlinks have been one of the top 3 ranking factors since forever.
However, Google recently said that backlinks aren’t as important as they used to be. Since Google said this, it must be true, right?
Well, let’s do a little experiment.
Try searching in Google with a random keyword, for example, “best air purifier for pet hair.” Now, let’s analyze how many backlinks the top search results have.
*Data collected from SEOQuake extension by SEMRush
Except for the forum and product pages (Reddit and Amazon), the other 8 pages have hundreds of backlinks, and their domains have millions of backlinks in total.
This is just one keyword. You can follow the same process with any other keyword and will see that the top-ranking pages have a large number of backlinks.
Even after analyzing SERP for different keywords, if you still believe backlinks aren’t important, then it’s up to you.
10. Page Speed Doesn’t Matter
As we have said before, UX (user experience) is a key factor in ranking. So, that means you must create content that resonates with your user’s needs. But is that all?
No, user experience depends on many things, and one of those is how fast your website is loading.
The new generation of searchers wants fast and immediate answers to their queries. There’s a stat about technical SEO that says, “47% of consumers expect a load time of less than 2 seconds.”
That means, that even if your website ranks at the top but isn’t fast enough, no one will wait for it to load.
Instead of waiting, your users will move on to the next search result. As a consequence, your bounce rate will shoot up and you will lose your ranking.
Let’s throw in another stat to prove our point. According to Google, sites with a load time of 3 seconds have a bounce rate of 32%, whereas sites with a 5-second load time have it at 90%.
Just a one-second delay can cost you 32% of your traffic.
That’s not all. If your website isn’t fast to load, it’s highly unlikely that the same user will return or recommend it to others. So, in reality, you will lose a lot more than 32%.
Because of this, your website load time should be a priority.
11. Mobile Optimization Isn’t Necessary
Just like page speed, mobile optimization is another ranking factor that highly impacts user experience. However, businesses still undervalue it.
Most businesses want an attractive website for their users, which is a good thing. But they are reluctant to create a mobile version of it. That’s because they believe it doesn’t really affect anything.
But the reality is the opposite.
When indexing, Google prioritizes the mobile version of your website rather than the desktop one. So, if you do not have a website that’s optimized for mobile, you may have trouble indexing.
Also, 96% of internet users have smartphones and almost 60% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices.
So, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you will be losing out on 60% of your potential customers.
12. The Only Search Engine That Matters Is Google
Google is, without any doubt, the most used search engine in the world. It receives 8.5 billion searches every day, which is almost 92% of all searches.
It is understandable why most SEOs focus their optimization efforts on Google. But does that mean we should ignore the remaining 8%?
Let’s do the math.
If Google gets 92% of daily traffic, which is 8.5 billion searches, then the remaining 8% is more than 78 million searches per day. Although smaller in comparison, this is a huge number nonetheless.
We are not saying that we should ignore Google, but we should save a little effort for the other search engines.
On top of that, people use social media as search engines nowadays.
For example, when someone needs a restaurant recommendation, they search on YouTube or TikTok because there are food vloggers who may have created a video review. For a personalized problem, it’s trendy to ask questions on Facebook groups or forums for more accurate answers.
That’s why, you should optimize your content for other search engines and create different forms of content for different social media platforms.
13. Google’s Guidelines Must Be Followed Like the Bible
In case you didn’t know, Google has a search guideline that explains how to create the best content. In normal circumstances, following these guidelines, should get you the ranking you need.
But, think about it.
Google’s search guidelines are public information. So, if every SEO in the world follows the same guidelines, who gets the better ranking?
There’s one simple explanation for this: Google’s guideline isn’t SEO bible.
Obviously, Google doesn’t reveal everything about its search algorithms. That’s what SEO testers do.
They perform real-time, single-variable tests to find out what really works and what doesn’t.
On top of that, in the recent Google documentation leak, there has been some pretty interesting revelation.
For years, Google has denied that it measures domain authority, clicks, sandbox, etc. as a ranking factor. But after the leak, it was clear that Google actually uses them.
So, does that mean Google lies to SEOs?
No, they don’t. Well, they technically do, but it’s for a good reason.
That’s because Google wants to prevent the manipulation of these ranking factors and encourage people to focus only on the fundamentals, which is providing value to the user through helpful content.
Google’s search guidelines only give you the direction but don’t show you the path. While you should listen to what they say, you should also use the data you get from implementing different strategies and insights from SEO influencers.
Get Data-Driven SEO Strategy With VizibleSEO
In the age of the internet, it’s still funny and surprising that there are so many misconceptions and myths about SEO.
However, VizibleSEO does not tolerate these SEO myths because we believe only in real data, and data never lies.
So, for a complete, data-driven, and no-nonsense SEO, give us a call.